Innocent bystanders,
What a very curious state of affairs we have reached in Strayan cricket.
Perhaps the pivotal moment of the recent Test match series came late on the second day at Adelaide, when My Spy At The Ground - who was actually in the stands, and not pretending to be making pithy observations while watching television - sent through an urgent telegraph message: "I'm really pissed now. What's the score, Jimmy?" Be that as it may, what would Pup do now it's all over? Not many folks ask for MJ Clarke's opinion these days given his blockbuster breakfast radio show is garnering an impressive 1.6% of the available Sydney audience. That's almost like talking to four walls, but after Adelaide, he was said to have said "They are nothing without Kohli". Oh, for the benefit of hindsight.
Surely, surely, the
pink test experiment is finally dead, buried and cremated? Yet
another two-and-a-half day game in Adelbrain featuring an
average 140 runs per innings, and a wining margin of eight wkts,
employing a pink ball that explodes off a good length when new,
rears up into the teeth at night, but goes soft after about 20
overs and slows up on a pitch with way too many grass clippings
rolled in with the aid of the heavy roller. Hazo and Paddy were
just licking their chops with glee when they saw the ball doing
really stoopid things swerving all over the shop, and got into
the way of thinking "we're towelling them up here", otherwise
called "momentum", but it's way way short of a "fair contest".
If you get caught batting at night with a pinkie, you're dead
and gone.The chief tactic seems to be get as much daylight
batting in as you can.
Third grade teams don't
get bowled out for 36 on decent pitches unless there's something
very seriously wrong. The common line in the papers of it being
"inexplicable, pathetic, incredible" doesn't wash with me, or
the Stats Guru, who was quick to exclaim "Oh! Such a slow over
rate! Absolute shocker! What about the glacial accumulation of
runs!" after India were 3/107 at tea on the first day. Perhaps
there should be a push by the Stats Guru to have all pink ball
test matches expunged from the records and stripped of test
status on account of just being not right, while
admitting all the five-day games played in World Series as
official test matches, accommodating a new test playing nation
called Rest of The World or something or another. It's time for change, and the Pink
Stink it's now well beyond being a failed experiment. Just ask
Kookaburra, who've been driven completely nuts by it for years.
Can anyone at Cricket Straya or the ICC spell F-A-I-L-U-R-E?
But, of course, you
are not allowed to argue with 'progress' or the honky dollar
that's tied up in the now fading right's deals; the paid-out
commentariat over at the Kezza Stokes stable at Seven are not
permitted to get critical of the pitch or the ball, not even
when the pill is all but unplayable in the hands of a couple of
the best fast bowlers going. Damo Fleming came closest on the
telly when he couldn't contain himself for a moment longer and
blurted out "Oh! I love these bowler dominated Test matches!".
India has plenty of excuses for the woeful second innings in the
City of Churches, chief among them "yeah, a shit score in shit
conditions in a shit game".
Found myself about to
say to some child on Xmas Day, that Boxing Day has been a
long-standing rite with me since the age of nine. Ooops. That
was until being reminded by the Stats Guru that this Boxing Day
at the MCG "tradition" didn't become a thing until after
1969-70. Christ! Age hasn't caught up with me that quickly,
surely? Anyways, Boxing Day was always going to fall flat this
year on account of the plague - we knew that - but the crowd
even fell short of the maximum allowed under the Covid
regulations on every day of the game. So that's about
as much interest as there's ever been in going to test cricket on the later days
(after the mad mad crowd who traditionally Get On The Beers on
Boxing Day). Back in the day, under normal
circumstances, that'd mean long beer queues and all-in brawls,
but in these conflicted times of social estrangement it's a
"why bother?" People are still a bit leery of crowds, as you'd
expect, even as my Spy at The Ground remarked "cricket is a
very good Socially Distant game with the positioning of the
players, isn't it?" And besides, folks simply don't go
to the ground to watch the stand-by visiting skipper Rehane make
a statement after the Adelbrain fiasco, and bat all day, do
they?
So the tourists
win solidly by eight wickets in Melbourne in what? An
unremarkable Test match, over in under four days, on a dodgy
drop-in, with the tourist's temporary Captain's knock the deciding
factor, and what else? Oh, that's right, dropped catches lose
matches. Who had a lazy Xmas in the bubble, then? Oh, dear. So,
Straya goes and squanders a priceless 1-0 lead in a four test
series, which suddenly becomes one-all with two to play.
Then comes Syderney.
There was never any serious consideration given to actually
gracing the ground with my presence this year as it would have
been an entirely futile exercise. There was a shitfight over the
regulation size of the crowd before a ball was even bowled. Even
after the Avalon Clusterfuck, there was no debate about whether
the match would go ahead - oh, no siree - that was a promise
that
the Ruby Princess made, and promises made by the Ruby Princess
are promises kept. First it was going to be 50% capacity, then
they knocked that back to 25%, then 20%...at one stage during
the panic, found myself reading the SMH who in all seriousness
suggested the crowd would be limited at 2,000. Then came the
final word that it would be 10,000 and that's it. But from the
outset, they got 7-8 thousand daily crowds, mainly the Swami
Army on the drink. The Ruby
Princess has obviously never been to a Test match after tea on
any given day, when things tend to get a bit rowdy, tired and
emotional. And besides, who'd wear a mask throughout an
exhausting seven-hour day while drinking beer through a tube?
They were slung around most people's necks by then anyway, after they'd
decided from very early on that they'd Get on The Beers.
Sydney was once again
dropped catches lose matches. Don't they have some of those
practice slips catches machines in iso? Never mind the much
publicised "racial abuse" from behind the picket fence at the
SCG; it got me to thinking what Yabber would have thought of
Captain Paine being too busy yabbering behind the stumps and
calling Indian batsmen dickheads instead of concentrating on the
matter in hand - winning the match - while dropping three
catches, and fumbling a stumping which could have cracked the
game wide open very late in the five day piece. Who's the
dickhead now? India batting out the last day for a draw is so
unusual these days in Test cricket it was hailed as truly
remarkable - but a draw is still a draw - even if the tension can
go sky high if there's the slightest sniff of victory.
Onto Brisbane, humid
ol' Brisvegas for a game on a pitch on which a million AFL
matches had been played over the months prior. The joint looked
like a cow paddock pockmarked by the removal of the cow patts.
Of course the curator couldn't do much more than turn out a road
- nay, a four lane highway - from the mud heap he was given. The
look of the 5th day pitch was of cracked concrete - they were
too scared to put the heavy roller over it. After the Indians so miraculously performed three run
outs in a single innings, which is perhaps chief among the
cardinal sins of Test cricket, Paine's missed stumping on the
final day in the tropics is where the whole shooting match aka
the Border-Gavaskar Trophy was lost. Once again, Straya snatched
defeat from the jaws of victory, when the Troph was theirs for
the taking. Someone has to take responsibility, and that
somebody should be the skipper falling on his sword, Kim
Hughes-style, but without the sobbing. It's only a game.
Pup likes India - where
he's treated like royalty and being an MCC Life Member gets you
places - and he knows all about how India were so much more flexible
and adaptable to the highly usual playing conditions than Straya
ever were from beginning to end. And about Straya's initial
complacency through the pink prism of a day/night fantasy all
came crashing down around them in the lengthening shadows of the
Gabba, and how much the sudden end of "the Gabbatoir" era means
in terms of tremendous loss of face. Pup is a serious student of the game and he knows how losing the
33-year-long non-losing streak at the Brisbane Cricket Ground is
enough to really shit to tears the aficionado, not to mention
the home supporters at the Woolloongabba ground, who've been well used to
winning for nigh on a generation.
Given that the
epidemiologists are saying that everybody knows shit's fucked, and
2021 will be just as crapola cornflakes as 2020, you'd have to
think that an Strayan tour of The Veldt next month for a couple of test
matches must be
problematical, surely? The dropping of Wade for Carey makes sense
- one's on the way out, the other's coming in - but the news that
Travis Head and Moises
Constantino Henriques might be "fighting it out or the
No.5 spot" is of genuine concern. Joisus, Moises??? The middle order ranks
can't be that thin, surely? Never mind the best pace attack in the
world right now, the GOAT is starting to get long in the tooth on unhelpful pitches, and he has
no understudy. The list of problems goes on
So, perhaps now it'd be a good move to just unilaterally ban the Barmy Army from travelling to Straya in any way, shape or form for next summer's Ashes. Visas will be denied. Then we can just on get with what Strayan's were born to do -- unmercifully goad and sledge the Poms in peace - invoking derogatory racial stereotypes to the point of vilification. Everything else is just training for taking on England.
